Why aren’t new killers allowed to be strong?

Pinhead’s addons were nerfed because apparently he was “over performing”
and now people are already wanting The Artist nerfed even more? Even though the ‘idle crow’ damage from the PTB was already removed
Imagine if Nurse was a new killer and was only released today instead? She’d be nerfed into oblivion instantly. I imagine it would go something like this…
“we feel like Nurse has been over performing recently at higher MMR and agreed that the ability to ignore walls and pallets offered no counter play, so now when Nurse hits an injured survivor after blinking through an obstacle they will instead be put into the ‘deep wound’ status instead of going down
Why is it older killers like Nurse and Huntress are allowed to be strong but not newer killers?
Comments
Why would a killer have to be OP just because it’s new?
Nurse wouldn't be released today, which is what a lot of people (not me) have an issue with. Her design is so different than every other killer and she's the only killer that's slower than survivors.
Survivors now simply can't handle that killers should be difficult to beat in a 1v1 and cry for nerfs.
It's more that BHVR tend to start swinging the nerf hammer before the dust has had a chance to settle.
Take Pinhead as the best, recent example.
I came back to the game for him, as Hellraiser is one of my all-time favorite franchises.
When I started off, I was doing really well. I'd constantly get free chain hunts, people didn't know how to handle him and I'd win more often than not.
Two months later, I was struggling without addons. People learned how to handle the box and how to juke his chains.
When I played him on Sunday, I got rolled pretty hard. With addons.
What I'm saying is that giving the meta a chance to readjust and letting people learn to play against a killer, then waiting to see if the balance shifts naturally is always going to be preferable to just hacking away the second someone complains.
There is also a degree of 'sour grapes' here, as killers always seem to get slapped with overly harsh, extremely fast nerfs while ridiculously broken stuff like OoO and DS took years to be nerfed and we still have CoH (and now Overcome) which are so obviously game-breaking that...yeah. People get frustrated because it feels like there is a double standard at play.
Killers HAVE to be weak. Simply because the game needs 4 survivors and only 1 killer. So if killers were actually strong, then everyone would play killer and the killer queue would be unbearable.
At least this would be a logic explanation. Instead of the alternative...
They have built-in counters, all these new killers. As early as Wraith with lightburn, we've seen this, but especially in the new killers like Twins, Nemesis, and Pinhead. Let the survivors kick the killer, give the survivors free cures, and let the survivors take away the killer's power for the next 90 seconds. It's a survivor-ran circus.
The ACTUAL answer is that BHVR is afraid and have no idea how to balance the game.
The longer answer is that BHVR does not possess the knowledge of an experienced PvP game developer to not cater to the masses when it comes to balance. The masses of this game are survivor players. Just math proves this. If you don't have the game as survivor sided, logic would state survivor play would go down. And snowball snowball snowball from there. BHVR thinks this is true. It is not. Because they continue to hamstring decent (not even good) killers because they are "unfun" proves they have no idea what is going on with balance.
Now this is PARTIALLY because of the games BASE design. This game was never designed to have the player base it does have. Any small indie dev (which is what this game used to be run by) can design a map/killer/survivor system as basic as the one we have right now. There's no map interaction, its VERY simple, one dimensional, and you allow the fact that its a PvP game to give it replayability.
This game unfortunately just lacks enough depth to be ALLOWED to create fun new things. Nurse is literally the only killer in this game who actively interacts with an Axis besides the X. There is only so much you can do with flat ground.
TL;DR Devs have no idea that you don't need to cater to masses to balance a game, and this game doesn't actually leave much room for balance without a massive overhaul of the entire baseline
Cause we can't have nice things. When killers perform well against survivors that dont run into walls, that's over performing. If players use her well; come mid-patch we should expect the changes that were held back.
I think survivors lose perspective. The stronger a killer is, the more impactful each individual survivor is allowed to be.
Its even crazier when you consider who she was released alongside of. You've got "Man with traps." "Invisible man." and "Chainsaw Man" and then you'e got "Woman who can literally move through walls"
she never fit into the game from day one of release.
They need four times as many survivors, so they choose to have survivors in the power role. But I as survivor wants killers to be much stronger, so you could fear them in some way. As solo survivor I want to escape 10% of the games not 70. Escaping should be something amazing and almost rare.
Good thing we got her or we wouldn't even know what a decent Killer looked like.
yep survivors cry about anything
if they can't counter and bully it. it is broken and needs a nerf
Spirit was released a year and a half later
Be careful there, you might trigger a whole lot of survivors who want an easy game.
I never thought spirit was that strong, so not much of a statement. And now she's utterly trash to me. Literally, Nurse is the only viable Killer far as I'm concerned. All others are garbage.
Thats why is 4v1. SoloQ is unberable to all, so swf is a way to go.
coop is the key? or coop counts only on gens, healing and group slavic dance moves at exit?
She's already been nerfed in the update. Devs are survivor sided. Killers in this game are not supposed to be scary unstoppable monsters..... but easily defeated by torches and wood.
The game is exclusively designed for people who have under 50 hours
Good logic but is very flawed. Survivors are needed true but the killer is also required. Without the 1 killer there is no game. Without the killers the game doesn't have anyone playing it because otherwise what would be the point. Basically put killers NEED to be strong because otherwise there is no point in playing this game to begin with.
I am interested in what you believe the alternative to be. Honestly I agree that they actually need to see over a period of time what people are complaining about when it comes to what makes killers oppressive regarding certain combinations, not annoying, not unfun, but oppressive combinations that can then be balanced appropriately and then tested before being updated.
For example, before the nerf to Cenobite it could have been something that was instituted in a safe environment under multiple combinations and additions and then tweaked before being updated. If only BHVR had the ability to allow these types of things to be tested by the players in some sort of public test build to iron these things out before updating them. We can only dream.
Because we aren't allowed strong killers they have to be able to bullied into submission by survivors. I swear bhvr don't even test viability against swfs etc.
She is gonna be nerfed again soon as well I reckon
What most here fail to realize is that vast majority of the playerbase are casuals, to go against s tier killers nurse blight spirit (double speed add on) require knowing every tile and map generated rng and on top of that be creative & random with movement pattern against "godly" nurses. That alone is only seen on 4-10k hours survivors. Sadly 1-3% of the playerbase will not finance an entire company (BHVR)
I don’t see the issue with the remainder of dbds lifespan having gutted killers for the foreseable future when you have 90-95% win rate killers such as nurse, will most reach that mastery most likely not same can be Said about the likelihood of 4x survivors going against that nurse one weak link is enough to wrap things up.
I do not believe this game is tested for anything besides the newest players because that's the only thing behavior cares about
That's. True
Strong = overpowered to Swoopie. Can't play a balanced match, killers have to be weak.
They say that the balance of the killer is based on how many kills you can get consistently.
In the JP forum, they said the following.
~2k: Very good balance. This is where we aim to make adjustments.
3k: We think it's too strong and needs to be fixed.
4k: Overwhelming and needs to be fixed immediately.
All of the killers will be adjusted so that the game's result will be 2k2e, so according to the kill rankings released last time, almost all of them will be scheduled to be weakened.
Just like Facebook, its all about the money. Everything else is just a distraction.
That can work for both sides
People still say decisive is to strong when the only way to get hit by it is to
A actually tunnel a survivor
Or
B have a survivor doing ######### all for the next 60 seconds which is giving you free pressure
Bingo.